Volocopter's eVTOL air-taxi bet ends in insolvency; Wanfeng buys assets for €10M

A Bruchsal, Germany eVTOL maker developing the two-seat VoloCity air taxi and the larger VoloRegion, aiming at urban air mobility services.

That eVTOL air taxis could be certified by EASA in time for city services, if it could keep financing a 13-year certification path until revenue began.

Backed by Mercedes-Benz and Honeywell; Geely led a €50M Series C in 2019 with Daimler participating. No reliable total-funding figure in reviewed sources.

Founded in 2011 in Bruchsal by Alexander Zosel and Stephan Wolf, Volocopter pitched electric vertical-takeoff air taxis for cities. It drew industrial backers such as Mercedes-Benz, Honeywell and, from 2019, Geely, and planned to launch commercial flights at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

By late 2024 Volocopter had about 500 employees (down from roughly 700) and show flights near Versailles, but no EASA type certificate. A bid for up to €100M in state loan guarantees failed in April 2024; separate requests for €50M each from the federal government and Bavaria also came to nothing. The company filed for insolvency at Karlsruhe local court on 26 December 2024, and Tobias Wahl was appointed provisional administrator with a restructuring plan due by end of February 2025.

On 5 March 2025 administrator Wahl signed an asset purchase agreement with heptus 591.GmbH, a unit of China's Wanfeng Group, owner of Austrian aircraft maker Diamond Aircraft. Wanfeng paid €10M for Volocopter's tangible assets, intellectual property and certain contracts, whose book value was about €42M; fewer than half of employees were expected to return. The revived company kept the Volocopter brand and resumed VoloCity certification with Diamond's team.

Volocopter raised public and industrial capital for 13 years without a commercial passenger flight, making the whole venture a bet that certification would arrive before funding ran out.

The fatal moment was financing, not technology: when €50M federal and €50M Bavarian guarantees failed to materialize, insolvency followed within months.

The asset sale shows how a failed startup's technology can be repriced: Wanfeng paid €10M for assets carried at roughly €42M book value, a 76% discount.

As Europe's first and best-funded eVTOL pioneer, its collapse — days after Lilium's — revealed the sector's reliance on certification timelines and political support rather than revenue.

Certification is a funding race: technical lead and industrial backers don't matter if capital runs out before approval, and state support can vanish on political timing.

As of September 2026 Volocopter operates under Wanfeng Group ownership with the brand intact, working with Diamond Aircraft's certification team on the two-seat VoloCity; Diamond's plants in Austria and Canada anchor manufacturing and more than 5,500 Diamond aircraft are in service worldwide. Headcount was cut sharply in the sale, and the larger VoloRegion program remains on the roadmap. Original shareholders received nothing from the insolvency; Wanfeng Aowei's filing valued the acquired assets at about €42M book value against the €10M purchase price.